The Inside Story Of How Greenpeace Built A Corporate Spanking Machine To Turn The Fortune 500 Into Climate Heroes

The Europeans remained proponents of direct action, but only as part of a multipronged effort that also included “solutions work,” such as developing feasible alternatives to unsustainable practices, and opening negotiations with corporate adversaries. They were also eager for the NGO’s many semiautonomous satellite offices to coordinate their efforts around large-scale, global issues such as climate change and GMOs.

The Americans were still in protest mode, putting their efforts into local battles and community building in a bid to jump-start a broad social movement.

They were dedicated activists on both sides, all zealous do-gooders. But the philosophical gap soon became unbridgeable. And there was another problem. The sprawling network was governed by a longstanding arrangement by which the national groups based in rich countries paid annual dues to the home office in Amsterdam, which used the funds to support less wealthy satellites in the developing world.

The setup worked well, but a wrinkle had emerged: Greenpeace USA was going broke.

The effort to build a grassroots movement based on retail canvassing and coalition building had taken a toll on the American group’s public profile. As a result, its fundraising tanked.

Although the localized approach led to some important wins — for instance, curtailing the dumping of toxins in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” — they came at the expense of the global organization’s key priorities. For instance, Greenpeace USA was missing in action during the negotiations over the Kyoto Protocols, essentially declining to participate. And it opted out of the GMO campaign, which was gathering steam around the world. Membership and donations plummeted by more than 60%. As a result, levies paid to the central office slowed to a trickle.

Eventually, acting on a clause in the bylaws, international body took aggressive action, dismissing Greenpeace USA’s executive director and parachuting in a replacement in from Amsterdam with a mandate to clean house.

The acting director laid off 335 staff members out of a total of 400 (mostly door-to-door canvassers) and slashed the annual budget by more than 25%. The board of directors was sent packing.

After a period of soul-searching, the U.S. group signed on the global agenda, retooled its operations and replaced the expensive canvassing efforts with an expanded online presence. Eventually, the organization began to notch some wins — on GMOs, for instance, and the use of toxic chemicals in children’s toys — which began to reduce internal tensions. Membership rolls bounced back and the money started flowing again.

Giving Up On Government

Greenpeace’s energetic crusade to turn corporate transgressors into eco-champions came about in response to a sudden realization that the traditional approach, pushing for government regulation, had become a spectacular failure.

“A lot of NGOs working on deforestation had a bit of a pipe dream that some sort of U.N. climate treaty or U.S. law, cap and trade or something, would save the day,” says Rolf Skar. “The disappointment that was Copenhagen” — the 2009 U.N. climate summit widely regarded as a bust — “left a lot of us scratching our heads about what to we could go next.”

An ad parody dinging Apple for using coal power. The company is now committed to clean energy.YouTube

In the U.S., the inertia around environmental issues can be attributed to the paralysis of a divided and acrimonious legislative branch. As Radford points out, “There hasn’t been real national environmental legislation passed since Superfund in the 1980s.” The Clean Air Act, he notes, was technically an extension, and recent moves on green issues — like the tough new fuel standards — have come from the executive branch without congressional action.

“The old equation for environmental groups was help write a bill and get Congress to pass it, or pass state laws and then press for consistency,” Radford says. But now, the outsize influence of ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which aggressively promotes conservative policies in statehouses and municipalities, has come to dominate local politics. “And gerrymandering and voter suppression have made it hard to do much in Congress,” he says.

Apte puts it more bluntly. “I don’t believe our legislators will adopt any action on climate change,” he says. “Unfortunately, there are some politicians who are naive about the whole issue, and so much money is put behind those candidates that I doubt Congress will ever act.”

In many of the key countries where Greenpeace operates, authoritarian regimes and rampant corruption can create further difficulties.

“What we’ve come to learn from Indonesia and other countries that are incredibly corrupt, is if you can flip enough companies, then civil societies and the companies together can get laws passed,” Radford says.

He points to the example of ranchers in Brazil who were aggressively clearing forests to create more grazing lands. Some 75% of the beef was consumed locally, and the national government had a financial stake in the large beef processors, so Greenpeace’s leverage seemed minimal. But it turned out the leather was going to Nike, Timberland, and BMW. The group initiated campaigns against those brands instead. “It was real easy to get the attention of the cattle industry when those companies got on the horn and said, ‘We’ve got a problem here,’” Skar recalls. Before long, the beef producers came around, working with Greenpeace to adopt strict new policies against deforestation, without the Brazilian government’s input.

There are other reasons for this indirect approach. Greenpeace’s scuffles with governments have proved dangerous. In 1973, Dave McTaggart, who would become the group’s chairman, lost sight in one eye during a scuffle with French commandos after he tried to prevent a nuclear test in the South Pacific. More than a decade later, French intelligence agents bombed the Greenpeace ship, the Rainbow Warrior, which was attempting to prevent similar tests. A photographer was killed in the explosion, and the vessel was sunk. French officials initially denied involvement in the bombing, but the plot was uncovered by New Zealand police.

In the Amazon, death threats are so routine that activists wear Kevlar vests and travel in armored trucks. Greenpeace Brazil campaigner Paolo Adario, who often uses a small plane to identify clear-cutting in remote regions, has found himself unable to land at certain airstrips because of angry mobs waiting for him. Campaigners have been hung in effigy in Indonesia, and the Rainbow Warrior II was chased through international waters not long ago by an Indonesian destroyer and warplanes. Just last year, a Greenpeace ship protesting drilling in the Arctic was attacked by armed Russian commandos, who arrested the crew. The activists, called the Arctic 30, were charged with piracy, a crime carrying a 15-year sentence, before being released as part Vladimir Putin’s pre-Olympics amnesty.

By contrast, dealing with multinational corporations is a walk in the park. “Companies tend not to show up with automatic rifles and start shooting inches above your head,” Skar observers, referring to the aggressive tactics employed by the Russian military in the arctic standoff. “We’re nonviolent,” he says. “We’re not going to fight back.”

Moreover, corporations tend to be motivated not by ideology but by revenue, and are therefore less likely to question the hard science behind global warming. Notable exceptions include industry titans like Charles and David Koch, who profit directly from fossil fuels.

Tech companies especially have shown an awareness of the dangers posed by carbon emissions, perhaps because they are staffed and often run by young engineers and scientists. “One thing about working with the IT sector,” says Gary Cook, Greenpeace’s senior IT analyst, “is we have never had a debate about climate change. They all think it’s real.”

That helps explain why Greenpeace’s campaign to persuade major tech companies — most notably Google, Facebook, and Apple — to power their data centers with renewable energy has been so successful. After being slammed in Greenpeace’s 2012 report “How Clean Is Your Cloud?” Apple has since earned praise for committing to using 100% renewable energy to power its iCloud server farms. It even installed solar arrays at its facility in Maiden, North Carolina, rather than tap into the coal-generated power provided by the local utility, Duke Energy.

“The fact that Apple went and did that told Duke that if it sits on its hands, motivated companies can go around them,” Cook says. “Other commercial customers started to say, ‘Hmm, maybe we should look at this, too.’ Duke doesn’t make any money if companies generate their own power.” Before long, pressure from Apple, as well as Google and Facebook, persuaded Duke to create a program offering green power to major corporate customers rather than lose their business altogether. “Duke never would have done that on its own,” Phil Radford says.